Features

TPOP General Process

The Third Party Ordering Process (TPOP) allows you to process sales orders within Service Parts Management and to trigger the creation of orders directly. You do not deliver to the customer yourself, but rather transfer delivery of the goods to an external vendor. The external vendor accepts the purchase order that results from the sales order, and thereby takes on responsibility for fulfilling the sales order. You can decide to always transfer delivery of a certain product to an external vendor, or to do so only if you do not have the product in your own warehouse stock.

In this process, which is known as third-party order processing, the valid vendors are determined by sourcing in SAP Advanced Planning and Optimization (SAP APO). When a product is entered, the system creates a subitem (third-party item) that contains the vendor determined from SAP APO. The higher-level item is not relevant for delivery or billing. When you save the sales order, the system creates a planned purchase order in SAP APO. This planned purchase order is released depending on the order processing time of the vendor. After you have saved, SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) triggers creation of a purchase order in SAP ECC. As long as the planned purchase order has not been converted into a purchase order, it is still possible to make limited changes to order items on condition that no availability check has taken place. This means that you can react more flexibly to business changes when you are processing sales orders. In normal sales order processing in which data is replicated in SAP CRM and SAP ECC, it is not possible to make changes immediately after saving.

New Features in TPOP

When a supplier cannot supply goods to a customer, they must source the products from a third party vendor, who ships the products directly to the customer. If the third party vendor cannot supply the goods, they cancel the purchase order. Using an IDOC, this automatically updates the purchase order in ERP and the sales order in the CRM system.

The purchase order item in ERP is updated with a new confirmation line, with a confirmation key representing cancellation. The sales order item in CRM is updated with the confirmed quantity set to zero. These critical TPOP items can be tracked in the TPOP Monitor in CRM 7.0.